Testimonial: Obamacare Would've Missed My Wife's Breast Cancer

RUSH: Ron in Dallas, I'm glad you called, sir. You're next on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Happy Thanksgiving holiday dittos from --

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: -- where we dominated the Redskins yesterday in a most ripping 7-6 victory.

RUSH: (laughing) You call that dominating?

CALLER: (laughing) RUSH: Well, we waited until the last few minutes. It made it fun.

RUSH: Hey, you guys are 7-3.

CALLER: Yeah, whatever.

RUSH: You lead the division.

CALLER: And what did the Steelers do yesterday? That was a struggle. That was disappointing.

RUSH: That's two weeks in a row the Steelers had a bad-karma game. Yesterday was a trap game. In my office pool I predicted the Bengals to lose. I thought the Bengals would lose to Oakland in a trap game. You look past them. The Chiefs, they're a doormat. You look past them. They got Baltimore next week, the Steelers do, and it's a trap game. You look past them. They shouldn't have because they lost to Cincinnati the previous week, but it just --

CALLER: I lost a box of Allen Brothers steaks when the Steelers lost yesterday.

RUSH: Yeah? Did you bet the points?

CALLER: No. No, no, no. Rush, I think you're one of the smartest people in the country -- and I know you think so, too -- but I'll bet you and 99% of your audience has never heard of the most aggressive form of breast cancer there is. And this debate in Congress has really got me to think about this and got me to call in, and that type of breast cancer is called "inflammatory breast cancer." Have you ever heard of that before?

RUSH: I have not.

CALLER: So I imagine most of your audience have not either, and so let me quickly tell you what this is.

RUSH: Wait a minute. Do you think most women have not heard of it?

CALLER: Yes, sir, 'cause most doctors haven't heard of it, or haven't seen it and they misdiagnose it.

RUSH: Well, Dawn here says she's heard of it.

CALLER: Okay, one out of two. But you, the smartest man in the country, has not heard of it.

RUSH: One out of four because the other two have no clue either.

CALLER: Okay, so the reason I called is these people -- if we had a rationed health care system, this type of breast cancer -- will not have any chance of survival because it's all about speed of starting the treatment for any chance of beating it. And if the government were in charge, these people, none of them would be around because it's too aggressive. You can't wait months to be seen. It's too expensive, and one of the shots costs a lot. My wife, she had to have it four times and it was over $7,000 a shot, and it's a very low mortality rate. It's the most rare form of breast cancer, but it's the most aggressive and it presents over 25% of breast cancer deaths. And the scary thing is, mammograms don't pick it up typically and it doesn't present as a lump and it also hits younger women. And so, you know, it's misdiagnosed. It's stage three automatically, but most are stage four, and it's very expensive to treat. So doctors think it's an infection, and so most people don't know what this is, and unfortunately if we had a government health care system in place... And my wife, who does not follow politics as much as I do, really knew what was going on about this and said, "You know, if we had that health care system in place I wouldn't be here."

RUSH: Seven thousand dollars a shot?

CALLER: That was just the shot to get her white blood cells up the morning after chemo, and I can guarantee that wouldn't be allowed. She had to do that four times, and if you saw the 60 Minutes deal last night they were talking about a drug called Avastin. And if I can recall, they were talking about the fact that in aggressive late-stage breast cancers where Avastin is used, that's upwards of $40,000 for those shots and there's no way that they would allow something like this, and it's a very scary disease that most people haven't heard of.

RUSH: How is it diagnosed if a mammogram doesn't pick it up and if it doesn't lump?

CALLER: Great question. The way my wife was diagnosed was they had to go in and do a core biopsy, not a needle biopsy. She did that, too, but it didn't pick it up. They did a a core biopsy, and the only way she --

RUSH: Wait. You're ahead of us. What's the symptom that caused her to go get that?

CALLER: Well, late October last year she thought something was wrong. She felt she had a bug bite underneath her right breast. It looked like and felt like a bug bite and she didn't do anything. She went into the doctor and they had her go do a mammogram. She was 34 at the time. She went and did a mammogram. The mammogram came back clean and they said, "Come back and see us when you're 40." So she was on a trip to Toronto for business, and her mother is a teacher. One of her teacher friends sent her mom a video on the internet and said, "Hey, you might want Stacy to see this." Mom sends it to Stacy in Toronto and three minutes into it she said, "I think that's what I've got," and it's a video that's been out since 1994 on KOMO Seattle. If you Google it and do "KOMO IBC" you can see what it is. She came home early and within the week she was in chemo, and we went to the right doctors after the first one kind of screwed things up, and we went to one that had seen this. Most doctors haven't seen this, and this guy in Baylor, Dallas, gets 25 cases a year and he said, "This is what you got." All of a sudden she was in high-dose chemo within the week and she was stage three. Most people don't get diagnosed in time and it becomes stage four and it's all over their body. So if you have the health care system in place that Obama is talking about, these people simply wouldn't get the treatment in time, and that's exactly what would happen.

RUSH: Well, they might not pay for a $7,000 shot.

CALLER: Well, there you go. But then the white blood cell count is too low and you're not going to be able to stand the chemo. It's very scary, and most people have not heard of it. My mom's a nurse. She hadn't heard of it. For 25 years she was in oncology and she had never heard of it. The first doctor we went to only saw three cases in her life and she didn't know what it was or she couldn't figure it out.

RUSH: See, stories like this -- and I'm sure that there are other procedures and diseases that have rare procedures that are expensive and so forth -- illustrate for me, again just using common sense, that this health care legislation is not about health care at all. If it were about health care, it would be focusing on the actual health care system not providing insurance to people, and it wouldn't be talking about "cost control" and doing this and all of that as though it's a burden of the government, the health care system is. It's a rigged system to raise taxes, to redistribute wealth, to empower Democrats, to grow government -- all under the guise of be compassionately oriented towards providing insurance to people.